Pro- or Anti-Labor?

Via Doug Henwood, I’ve just found out about Bob Fitch and his book Solidarity for Sale, which discusses the decline (if there ever was a peak) of the US labor movement. I know next to nothing about this guy and his arguments, but I found the contrast between this Amazon review…

The book can make you think, and it could potentially serve as a tool to get more workers OUT of unions.

…and this excerpt from an interview with Fitch:

It’s the lack of countervailing union power that best explains the widest income inequality in the advanced industrialized world, the most limited workers’ rights, and what is easily the meanest and the crummiest welfare state.

[…]

But because our unions are ineffective doesn’t mean that unions, as an institution, are irrelevant. The class struggle is not a product of Marxist metaphysics. As long as capital sees labor — as it must — as a cost to be cut, there will be a need for working-class institutions of resistance.